Caltrain Schedule Update on March 3, 2008
iCaltrain has been updated to reflect the new, evening train schedule.
“Effective Monday, March 3, Caltrain will add two evening local trains to its weekday schedule. The additional service will fill a gap in evening service in both directions and make the schedule easier for customers to remember. Trains will depart every hour on the half-hour from San Jose from 7:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. From San Francisco trains would depart every hour on the half-hour from 7:30 p.m. until 10:30 p.m.; however, the final southbound train will still depart from San Francisco at 12:01 a.m.” via Caltrain.com
March 4th, 2008 at 12:25 am
Have you considered accommodating transfers in your program? For example, trips between Belmont and San Antonio require a transfer. Another example are trips from south of San Jose that can have a shorter travel time if transferred to a Baby Bullet train in San Jose.
March 4th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Any thoughts on how to design the UI to make it clear what station and which train to transfer to? The iPhone version has more pixels to work with so it might be possible.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Transfers aren’t required always, but for example if you were traveling from Belmont to San Antonio on a weekday, and needed to be at your destination before 8 am you would have to take 208 at 7:04 am and transfer at Redwood City to 210 (actually, I think you could transfer also at San Carlos and Palo Alto), which would get you to San Antonio at 7:34 am. It is funny that I had actually never realized transfers would be needed in some cases.
I thought about a UI but no good ideas at the moment.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
I found some bugs in the latest Caltrain schedule:
1) Train 146 (weekday southbound) from Menlo Park to Santa Clara has times 13:XX (should be 1:XX).
2) Train 195 (weekday northbound) arrives in San Francisco at 10:01 (should be 11:01).
I fixed these in my app, http://caltrain.heikkitoivonen.net/.
March 10th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
@ Heikki,
Thanks for letting me know about the schedule bugs. The bugs were in the web schedule on the Caltrain site on March 3. It looks like they’ve fixed them and I’ve updated iCaltrain accordingly.
March 15th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Hey Mike,
I’ve been finding myself on Caltrain a lot this past month, and I have to say that iCaltrain is my new favorite iPhone webapp–it makes it a lot easier to figure out which trains will actually stop at the stations I want.
BTW, could you shoot me an email? I was sending a note about the new Caltrain data feed to all the Caltrain app developers that I knew of yesterday, and I realized that I didn’t have your contact info handy.
April 29th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Hey Mike, great tool. I would find a “reverse stations” button on the search form very useful. I know you can do the return trip link from the search results, but changing it upfront with JS would be faster (and less load on your server too)…
July 8th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
First, thanks for developing this tool!
I am now using the new Samsung/Sprint Instinct. The page loads without an issue, but the pulldown menu, only displays Santa Clara, through Tamien…so basically the last four options in the menu. There is no cursor to move up or down the list. Any ideas? Trying to get to Menlo Park.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
@ Katherine, I don’t have that specific model to try the site, but I would think there’s a way to scroll through a drop down list. Perhaps you can try posting a question in one of the Samsung Instinct forum, such as http://www.sprintinstinctforum.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=31
July 12th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
@Nathan, great idea. Look for it in the next update that’s coming soon.
July 24th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Hi Mike,
Awesome tool. I was wondering if you could put another column for caltrain number after the travel time. Sometimes the trains come within 5-10min of each other or the schedule gets out of wack if there is a delay and it’s hard to tell which one is which without the train number.
August 7th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
@ Nathan, just added the swap station feature. Click on “From:” to see it in action.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:54 pm
This could be a bug or could be something else, but on the schedule from Mountain View to 22nd Street/San Francisco shows the 5:03 PM and 4:58 PM trains out of order. Specifically, the 5:03 shows up before the 4:58 even though all the other trains are in order from earliest to latest.
November 11th, 2008 at 6:08 am
The 6am from SF actually leaves at 6:11 and arrives 6:36 in SM.
Glad it left later instead of before 6!
Thanks!
March 12th, 2010 at 5:13 pm
Just preordered my apple ipad today. Can’t wait for it to get here!
May 28th, 2010 at 2:16 am
Graet post I have the 3GS now!